THE CARPENTER
It's Halloween again, and for our 12th annual Switcheroo with Brennan Klein of Popcorn Culture, we're doing what we always do this time of year when we turn the tables on one another: he takes over my Cardboard Science feature and reviews some of those corny mid-century sci-fi movies, and I do some fieldwork for Brennan's Census Bloodbath, as he gives me a slate of sick 80s slasher flicks from his ever-expanding encyclopedia of death. This year we're back to full power, with three psyche-scarring films of Brennan's selection.
1988
Directed by David Wellington
Written by Doug Taylor
I don't begrudge anyone their good feelings for The Carpenter—"anyone" obviously including our October taskmaster, but a quick glance at Letterboxd confirms it's reasonably well-liked for such a completely below-the-waterline late-stage slasher flick—because it at least sounds interesting, and can, sometimes, be interesting. (Maybe not as interesting as the title might suggest, for it's a slasher about a laborer who does carpentry, not a horror movie set in Bible times. However, perhaps you'll be pleased to know precisely such a thing is imminent.) Of course, you don't start out a positive review with a "sorry if you liked it," and unsurprisingly I did not, and I'm going to have to get mean sooner rather than later: it's pretty much all bad, and the ways it can be bad are sort of interesting, mostly because the ways it does things are wrong, most obviously with "attempting to be a slasher film, specifically, in the first place" though it's only a little less wrong about "being psychohorror" or "being a ghost story," for instance the way it sort of smooshes "psychohorror" and "ghost story" indifferently together just assuming those things automatically reinforce one when, if they're mishandled, it's more like they cancel each other out. It's also wrong about basic components of filmmaking, though I guess that's on purpose.
So let's enter the Dissolve Transition Dimension we'll be languishing in for at least the next fifteen minutes, and meet its mentally fracturing queen, Alice Jarrett (Lynne Adams), whom we first encounter being inscrutable and symbolic in her and her college professor husband Martin's (Pierre Lenoir's) city apartment, taking a pair of scissors to one of his suits and cutting it into ribbons with the kind of glassy-eyed automatism that, when Martin comes home—dismayed but not entirely surprised, for it's clearly not the first time something like this has happened—Alice's next stop is a residential care facility. Approximately fifty or sixty dissolve transitions later (I am legitimately not kidding, at all, it's deliberate but it is searingly irritating), she at least gets well enough to check out, and, probably to help along her recovery though it's honestly a lot more like genre convention and the plot needs it to happen, Martin moves his wife out to their new country estate in a stretch of geography semi-pointlessly pretending to be the United States. (The Wikipedia summary insists this Canadian slasher is set in Canada, but it's just wrong: Quebec, New Brunswick, and southern Ontario still have counties—they were also the only subnational units to still retain that municipal organization by 1988—but I'm not convinced they had county sheriff's offices to send county sheriffs (Ron Lea) out to exposit backstory about old houses, and I'm pretty willing to bet that even if they did, for such a thing is plausible enough, their uniforms still wouldn't have included stars and stripes. There will also be a reference to execution, by electric chair, things Canada abandoned in 1976 and never used at all, respectively.) In any event, this old house was never quite finished—that sheriff will let us know why later—and Martin has dragged his crazy and fatigued wife out to the country to spend all day around a lot of loud banging noises for the foreseeable future, though let's not imagine Martin is a particularly good husband.
Indeed, on one of Alice's first nights in the new home those banging noises start up even as late as it is, waking her, and she discovers there's a lonely but diligent carpenter down in the basement, who eventually introduces himself as Ed (the apparently-famed Wings Hauser), and for now simply states the job isn't finished, and he doesn't like to leave anything unfinished. She accepts this, and takes a liking to the fellow, who at first only seems to be around when nobody else is—or, at least, they don't survive, as when Ed intercedes between Alice and another workman (Johnny Cuthbert) who's decided to swing by one night and rape his employer, whereupon Ed dismembers the trespasser and disposes of the body, earning a friendship with Alice that is very likely to become something more as her actual marriage disintegrates due to, mostly, just mutual disinterest. Of course you're probably a step ahead of Alice: as that sheriff will come to mention, this house was originally the dream home of a certain Edward Byrd, who built it all by himself (including, I guess, the wiring, and the plumbing) but got himself deep into debt in the process, and resisted his creditors' efforts to collect by murdering seven of them before he was caught and executed. It's possible, of course, that Alice has figured out her deadly new boyfriend is a ghost already.
If any of that sounds vague, I apologize, but that's kind of the core problem with the movie: Alice is just about as unacceptably vague a protagonist as you get, and that's because what the movie is trying to do is, potentially, just not compatible with what it is. So like I said, I can see getting yourself inveigled by it: it's a movie that, very uncommonly for a slasher of its era, has serious dramatic ambitions, and not just the seriousness of the mordant subtext that unavoidably accompanies even the dimmest-witted campfire tales about death, but overtly and as a whole object, cinematically and narratively, with something to say (and all day to say it—it's a fairly long-feeling 89 minutes as a result), prima facie feminist and sticking to the dreamlike fugue that it hopes replicates the mental state of its heroine. And what it feels like, mostly, is two layers of movie kind of sliding off one another: I would probably accord it enough credit that what director David Wellington is doing is at least similar to what screenwriter Doug Taylor intended, but the screenplay feels much wackier than Wellington is (almost) ever going to allow it to be.
I should probably start, though, with "it's not exactly a very good screenplay in the first place." Given its desperate urgency to establish Alice as dealing with bouts of insanity, it never needs nor even benefits from having a crazy protagonist. It never calls into question the objective existence of her phantom suitor (if you're thinking "a psychological projection of her own killer instinct," man, the notion is never even played with), nor does it require (I'd say "more than the usual brusque dismissal" but I wouldn't need to go that far) Alice's insistence on his reality to be disbelieved, until-it's-too-late or otherwise. Everybody that eats it in this movie has never even seen Ed before he kills them, with no reason to believe or to disbelieve in him. In other words, here's a heroine who's barely recovered from a psychotic break. Now, here's a ghost.
To the extent these two things actually interact, I can only guess the former's to make the screenwriting as frictionless as possible, silently justifying why Alice accepts Ed so readily, plus the occasional corpse, along with justifying why it's forty minutes between her witnessing a murder and the most minute acknowledgment in Adams's performance that murder might be slightly abnormal. It winds up bungling whatever it's trying to do with the husband, who is somehow, all at once, the world's most tediously-boring, dead-toned passive-aggressive schlub, an overbearing and dangerous patriarchal figure, and a charismatic philanderer running about impregnating his hardest-bodied students (Louise-Marie Mennier). Without intending to be too mean to Lenoir, he manages that first thing with such enormous success that the third thing surges into the kind of unbelievability you only get in a movie that needs to gin up body count characters, whether it's heart might be in it or not; the middle one is mainly highlighted by his insistence that his sick wife take her prescribed medication, though it bleeds over pretty effortlessly into the first thing (that is, being offensively boring) when the film spends a solid minute on the unbearable suspense of this cheating husband, now pushed into a corner, feeding those sedatives to Alice without her knowledge or consent and finding him... well, sticking to the dose the doctor told her to take in the first place. What a thrill-ride it is. It's not a hell of a lot better on the carpentry front: the movie has, I think, a genuine need to be at least halfway-decent at paranormal romance, finding something seductive behind Hauser's crazy racoon-like eyes, and there's evidence of some effort on this front, but Taylor genuinely doesn't really know what to affirmatively do with that relationship besides positing it, and he's certainly not getting there by foisting the same conversation where Hauser's a folsksy Real North American who understands the value of Working With His Hands and The Sacredness of Labor get repeated four and possibly five times, breaking this pattern only when Ed whips out his genitals below the bottom of the frame, and the sound design indicates his penis is a drill, making this, apparently, The Slumber Party Massacre but set to reverse.
The "body horror, below the bottom of the frame" thing is also a problem, but let's delay that for another moment, because now we have how Wellington is pursuing this. Now, Taylor's designs are, I think, relatively clear: he's after a weird psychothriller with its basis in the parody of an idea of a women's romance novel (I don't think an especially well-read idea of a women's romance novel, but I can't say for absolute sure on that count), and he even shows his hand with Martin giving a tedious lecture about Paul Bunyan for some reason that dwells on the giant lumberjack's embodiment of masculinity, and I think he sort of intended this to be a comedy or at least funny-weird in the manner that was becoming popular by the end of the 1980s. Wellington will sometimes allow the energy of "comedy" to come through, and shift his movie towards a sense of the surreal and the uncanny that never really quite gels into any kind of coherent mood. Take the sheriff's sloppy loucheness, for instance, though pitching a character in that kind of mannered, slightly-inhuman performance style is something the movie does only a couple of times, next with Alice's airdrumming faintly-John Watersy boss at the paint store (Richard Jutras), a job she's taken primarily to be spattered with red paint for symbolic purposes; or, the unstressed impossible editing of our carpenter's conversation with Alice out in the yard while he simultaneously works on three or four entirely different tasks (one's a complete birdhouse!), a scene that ought to be slapstick but which is so unstressed I honestly had to have the supernatural conceit of the scene pointed out to me.
Or maybe that just tells you I had become disengaged rather quickly, because for the vast majority of The Carpenter Wellington isn't doing much of anything besides doing the story as dead seriously as possible without the corresponding discipline to make any of it work: I mean, I already mentioned the literal dozens of dissolve transitions during the first act that sure do communicate "nervous breakdown" while also making the movie so enervating it's virtually unwatchable for most of that act, but there's also the carpenter lighting a pipe in a pitch-black basement that comes off like literal errors were being made with the shot scale and how effectively the matchlight would reproduce on film, or we could go all the way back to the opening credits and be a little sad at a knock-off the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise's "starkly-presented procedural insert shot montage" only actually manages the one image of a circular saw.
But I meant to stick to the movie's affect, which is unrelentingly airless and dour without a vision to correct for the weaknesses of a screenplay that feels like it was written for a short film and then got stretched out with duplicated parts, when these Quebecois realized short films essentially didn't exist; Wellington's outrageous number of nighttime shots set to either lamplight-orange or moonlight-blue (there's one shot of the "moonlit" bedroom that is scarcely distinguishable from a tinted silent film, or maybe a really thoughtless music video) could be, I suppose, the beginning of a moody atmosphere, but it's also sort of the exhaustion of Wellington's toolkit here, which obviously wasn't that well-stocked in the first place, and it needs some atmosphere to overcome a slow story with a cast of characters that don't feel well-positioned to make a movie out of, given that the range of emotion permitted by the character dynamic can be summed up with the descriptions "dissociated," "stultifying," and "a Tory ghost." I'd probably go as far as to say it's being "feminist" wrong—whatever Wellington's up to, trying to find his way into the mind of a woman driven mad by [vague gesture towards society], the screenplay seems as eager to punish the self-evidently bad female romantic fantasy as anything else it's doing, and by the finale even starts getting confused about that, and about what can and cannot bring Alice back across the threshold from murderous madness and/or ghostly possession—take your pick, it's irritatingly still both!—by way of a superfluous sister showing up two-thirds of the way through the movie (Barbara Ann Jones), so even whatever power it had as a supernatural cautionary tale, or diabolical romance, or whatever it was meant to be, melts into mush.
And then it also has to be a horror movie and a slasher and it's not even really trying, man, and possibly not in any position to try—maybe it's even a late-80s MPAA thing—and I'd like to accord it the charity of saying "it's just the budget," but the budget I've seen is $350,000, which isn't much but isn't nothing, and this feels more like it simply resents the imposition. It has—maybe even a little contemptuously!—established a fun gimmick for its toolman killer (ayuh?), and close to zero kills actually make it into the frame. The only one that's ever showcased by the frame involves a circular saw, applied to that attempted rapist who, despite his previous rudeness, politely agrees to stand there whilst being dismembered, a tone of goofiness that isn't reflected by even the other tones of goofiness in the movie. A guy gets his head smashed in a vice and it's nothing. We never even see a tableau of death, so I guess the house really did swallow those corpses. Eventually there's a clever-enough resolution involving the identity of the house and its framer and not only does this not activate the special effects makeup artist, you get the impression they weren't allowed to fuck up the house that much. If it does at least end on a strong note—a bodacious flamesuit sequence—that's not necessarily even too little (it's really quite good), but it is too late.
Killer: Ed Byrd the Carpenter/Alice Jarrett
Final Girl: Alice Jarrett/Rachel the Sister/Ed Byrd the Carpenter
Best Kill: burning the house down to mystically effect Ed's immolation
Sign of the Times: one-income families headed by English professors have country houses
Scariest Moment: anytime Alice is at the paint store and the shaking machine is in operation (it just doesn't look safe); alternatively, when the terrifying thought occurred to me that the only editing possibility in the entire movie might be dissolve transitions, even between individual shots inside a scene
Weirdest Moment: fast-forwarding to Ed's surreal woodworking show after being apprised of its existence and wondering how I didn't notice
Champion Dialogue: "Well, that's a funny way to look at a psychotic mass murderer!"
Body Count: 6, including the killer
1. Roland, a rapist contractor, has his arms cut off by circular saw
2. Barns, a lazy contractor (Robert Austern), goes in for some dermabrasion treatment
3. Landis, a second lazy contractor (Anthony Ulc), has a tracheotomy effected via power drill
4. Laura is shot in the back (by Alice in jealous rage with some assistance by Ed) with a nail gun that unaccountably works like a bullet gun, but to be fair I thought that was cool in Arachnophobia
5. Ed finishes the adulterers off by crushing Martin's head in a vice
6. Ed is burned, uh, alive, or whatever
TL;DR: A vague satire of patriarchy or possibly of women, with only slightly less-vague comedy, that's been manufactured like a gender-swapped The Shining in a crappy regular house without a solid understanding of what "cross-dissolves" do and put at 1.5 speed that makes it feel like 0.5 speed, and all pressed reluctantly into the shape of "a slasher" with few of that genre's pleasures.
Score: 4/10
No comments:
Post a Comment